Iggy Pop (22 page)

Within a day or so, Jim had left for a string of Stooges shows in Canada and Arizona; the two kept in regular touch, on Todd’s phone bill - for which there would, of course, be more recriminations - planning a rendezvous before the Stooges’ show at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC on 19 August. Jim mentioned to a few people that Bebe would be attending the show; it caused some concern, for as Natalie Schlossman points out, ‘It was playing with fire, getting together with Bebe. I was worried about it. Everyone knew how influential Todd Rundgren was.’ The Kennedy Centre was a beautiful, prestigious venue; Bebe’s mom Dorothea was coming to the show, which was headlined by Mott the Hoople, while the Stooges savoured the fact they were staying at the Watergate Hotel complex, scene of Richard Nixon’s notorious bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Bebe and Jim arranged to take the train together out of Manhattan - a plan that Jim seized on, believes Buell, because he fancied the thrill of an illicit shag on the train. Unfortunately, Bebe arrived with a woman she’d met via Alice Cooper’s girlfriend, Cindy Lang.

When they arrived at the plush, modern theatre complex, Jim was still frustrated at having his train sex fantasy thwarted; when Cindy’s friend walked into the dressing room he snarled at her, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ It was, perhaps, in a bid to make herself useful that the interloper doled out a huge line of what looked like cocaine to placate the irate singer, who hoovered it up, not realising it was THC. He collapsed within seconds, occasionally burbling semiconsciously in response to who-knows-what visions as the powerful synthetic hallucinogen took effect. Bebe and road manager Chris Ehring slapped his face and attempted to walk him around the dressing room or get him to drink some liquid. As Jim’s fellow Stooges smoked cigarettes, contemplating their leader slumped senseless on a commode, Don Law - the show’s promoter, fast becoming one of the most powerful music-business figures in the area - walked in the dressing room, reminding them they were an hour late, and begged them to take the stage; finally, as he realised Jim was incapable of even walking, Law lost his cool, unbuckled his Rolex watch and smashed it against the dressing-room wall, screaming at the band, ‘You fucking guys will never work in this area again!’ The Stooges simply shrugged, by now immune to such abuse.

Eventually, Jim told them he was capable of singing, and the band rushed out on to the stage and started hammering out ‘Raw Power’, playing the opening riff again and again. And again; Thurston believes they repeated the opening chords for a full fifteen minutes before Chris Ehring carried Iggy on stage and dumped him there. Eventually Iggy managed to sing, mumbling the words at half speed, then decided to walk out into the audience, who were mostly dressed in crushed velvet suits and unmoved by the bizarre spectacle they were witnessing. Iggy returned and attempted to climb back onto the stage. His band laughed at his pathetic efforts until Thurston walked over to help him up - and then recoiled in horror: ‘I saw his chest, it looked like he’d cut himself up really bad, there were bits of flesh hanging on him, it was ugly to see.’ Disgusted, Thurston turned back to his piano as Ehring rushed over to investigate. A few minutes later, Thurston saw Ehring laughing as he discovered the gaping wound was in fact a peanut butter and jelly sandwich someone had crushed onto Iggy’s chest.

The incident became yet another surreal episode in the Stooges’ increasingly doomed drama. It contributed to a reputation for excess that meant they’d soon be thrown off tours for such minor incidents as eating a cake meant for the J. Geils band. For all the chaos - much of which, as with the THC, wasn’t totally Iggy’s fault - the Stooges still had a hard-working, Midwestern ethos, but little by little the number of venues willing to book them was dwindling. Bob Czaykowski would go on to work with a string of huge bands, including Aerosmith and Limp Bizkit (‘Wimps!’), but would consider the Stooges one of the hardest-working bands he’d ever encountered. ‘They wanted it. They wanted to play beyond their ability; they were trying to make some statement musically. And they were kind of pure. It was all about music and it wasn’t about business, most probably to their detriment.’ And even when things fell apart, there was little self-pity. ‘Ron, for instance, even though he had issues with James, always had a can-do positive attitude. He’d sustain things with his humour: “Oh you know, the singer can’t stand up and the drum set’s on fire and I can’t find my brother, but it’s a normal day in the life of a Stooge.”’ Even when things were more obviously messed up, says James Williamson, it was customary to ignore it: ‘Simply, we were young and we didn’t know any better. Besides, what else were we going to do?’

With their dozen or so shows on the East Coast and Canada completed, the Stooges made their way back to LA. But with no base from which they could work, their lives were increasingly fractured, and Jim moved around from location to location, finally ending up at the Hyatt Continental - which had become famous as the Riot House during Led Zep’s excess-fuelled stay there in June - hanging with Johnny Thunders after the New York Dolls arrived in LA on 29 August. Sable Starr was Johnny’s constant companion over that week, while Coral had returned from her trip to London and made up with Jim, which meant Johnny and Iggy were now rock ’n’ roll brothers-in-law. And their family relationship was celebrated, according to New York Doll Syl Sylvain, with Johnny’s induction into mainlining heroin. ‘Iggy and Johnny were always in Johnny’s room, and that’s when I saw Johnny finally high on smack. They were all doing it. It was in LA that I saw him change and he was never the same again.’

Thunders’ dalliance with heroin was infinitely more serious than that of Iggy, who always liked to boast of his physical indestructibility. Thunders’ life would soon follow an inexorable downward spiral; the guitarist was rarely off heroin or methadone thereafter, and would die in New Orleans at the age of thirty-eight.

By this point, scoring smack was a constant obsession of Iggy’s. Late one evening Annie Apple, who’d seen Jim around Rodney’s, answered the phone to hear: ‘Hi, I think you know me, this is Iggy Pop.’ Credentials established, he asked if she had any money, trading on his celebrity with relaxed ease. At around three that morning he knocked on her door at the Coronet, a once-magnificent Mediterranean Revival apartment building that had housed the House of Francis, an upmarket brothel, back in the 1930s. Now it was ramshackle, full of drug-dealers, hookers and artists, and was handily close to the Hyatt. Iggy was accompanied by Stan Lee, later the guitarist with LA punk band the Dickies, and Max, a well-groomed, suave European who was the main celebrity drug-dealer in Hollywood. It soon transpired that Iggy was planning to sell Annie his celebrated ‘cheetah’ jacket, in which he’d posed on the
Raw Power
sleeve, for $25, and Annie handed over the cash before Max realised what was happening. ‘You’re not hawking your jacket!’ Max informed Iggy, before taking the jacket and returning Annie’s $25. ‘Thanks for helping me out,’ Iggy told Annie politely before the three of them disappeared into the Hollywood night. (Lee would wear the cheetah jacket around LA for many years. It was slightly too small for him, and eventually fell apart.)

By now Iggy’s freeloading was notorious - there was even an urban legend that he used to stand beneath a huge Columbia billboard for
Raw Power
on the Strip, pointing to his photo as he panhandled for dope - but there was also a keen intelligence to his behaviour. During his brief visit to Apple’s apartment, Jim had recognised the potential of the Coronet, also known as the Piazza Del Sol, which was managed by Jerry Flanagan, an eccentric character who used to write hectoring letters to his tenants in exquisite longhand and sign them ‘the Corporation’. Apple had been planning to move out of her apartment, number 404, but after returning from a short trip to San Francisco she opened her front door, painted in sky blue with cheery white clouds, to discover that Flanagan had given the keys to Ron Asheton. Apple managed to retrieve a few of her meagre possessions, but left the Stooges with her pots and pans, and even her little brother’s sleeping bag - which Jim commandeered, sleeping on the plywood floor. It gave her an excuse to drop by every now and then and survey the activities at the Coronet. After James Williamson and Evita moved into their own apartment at 306, the run-down building became the Stooges’ base of operations.

After their two-week lay-off, the Stooges returned to the Whisky on 3 September, for a run of shows that by now were being poorly attended, according to Don Waller and fellow fan Phast Phreddie Patterson, who put together
Back Door Man
magazine. ‘When he came back in the fall there weren’t nearly as many people,’ says Patterson. ‘Some days we’d go and there was just us and a couple of others.’ Where on the previous runs the crowd had been so packed they could pass him over their heads, this time Iggy could dance out on the floor, just a few people around him. ‘Just doing his Iggy thing,’ says Patterson; at one point Iggy poured melted candle wax down his chest, just like the old days. Still, say Waller, Patterson and others, the band were on fire, playing more new songs, including ‘Heavy Liquid’, as well as baiting the audience most evenings. One evening Iggy announced, ‘We can’t be bought, not even in this town. Not by all the faggots in the world. Not by all the money in Israel.’ It’s tempting to speculate that Danny Sugerman and Jeff Wald made up the Jewish contingent in the audience that night; in any case, Wald decided to drop the Stooges over the course of their Whisky run, disturbed, he says, by Iggy’s erratic antics, and worried that he would be tainted by their fast-growing reputation as losers. ‘You are judged by your success and they weren’t a success. I didn’t want [them] to be my calling card, the artists by which they judge my management abilities. You could say it was a ruthless decision . . . I would prefer the word cold.’

Although Wald always insisted on firing bands in person - he wasn’t the kind of manager who left his underlings to perform brutal tasks - he remembers Jim as being composed and not particularly surprised. However, there were still a fair number of bookings dotted across the US, and a few days later the band returned to their Detroit home turf for two shows at the Michigan Palace, starting on 5 October.

There was something about the venue’s atmosphere that the band disliked, but the old theatre was packed, and by now the band were in their element. The Detroit audiences, more than anyone, appreciated the Stooges desperate, take-no-prisoners attitude and in-your-face aggression, and that night they received a raucous, enthusiastic reception, with the audience invading the stage at the end of the show. At some point, Iggy invited the crowd back to the band’s hotel, the Detroit Hilton, for what might well have been the band’s most gloriously depraved night in the city.

Michael Tipton and Natalie Schlossman, two of the band’s closest friends, were staying at the Hilton but, like most of the hotel guests, got little sleep that night. At one point Michael Tipton was chatting with Scottie Thurston in his room when James Williamson knocked on his door, walked in with two friends, one male, one female, explained that his own room was packed with people, asked if he could use Tipton’s bathroom, and the three of them disappeared inside. Twenty minutes later Natalie Schlossman arrived in search of James, and knocked on the bathroom door; after a pause, James and friends emerged, apologising to Tipton for the mess. Tipton looked in the bathroom and saw the walls were splattered with blood.

A couple of hours later Natalie got a call from Ron Asheton asking for a chat. She was about to take a shower and forgot to go down for some time. When she knocked on Ron’s door it swung open and Asheton told her, ‘Come on in, it’s cool.’ Inside were Ron and Scottie Thurston, both naked from the waist down, with one woman wearing an exotic wig and nothing else; the guitarist and mild-mannered keyboard player were ‘both kind of having a go at her’.

Later in the morning, Natalie heard her phone ring twice, called the operator and heard two messages from Jim telling her, ‘Come on down, pick me up and let’s go eat.’ She was already going for breakfast with Michael Tipton, and the two of them stopped at Jim’s room on their way downstairs. When the door opened Natalie and Michael saw approximately twenty people in the room in various sexual combinations; another couple - or other combination - was copulating against the bathroom’s glass door, banging against it so loudly Natalie thought it would splinter any moment. Jim stood there with shirt but no pants, a girl holding on to his legs. Politely, he told the pair, ‘Sorry, I’ve changed my mind, I think I’m going to crash.’

Ten minutes later Tipton and Schlossman were tucking into their morning coffees when Jim bounded into the restaurant. ‘I got rid of ’em,’ he whispered, before sitting down for breakfast.

The following night’s show was triumphant, too; the new, harder-rocking set went down better with the Detroit audience than the comparatively restrained Ford Auditorium show six months earlier; one Detroit fan, photographer Robert Matheu, remembers: ‘We all loved “Cock In My Pocket”, it became quite a local anthem for a while.’ A few days later, the band settled into a residency from 8 to 13 October at a small club called Richards, in Atlanta, Georgia, for what James Williamson regarded as a string of their best performances. Several of the band’s fans, including Ben Edmonds of
Creem
, conspired to raise their morale with an endorsement by Elton John. Elton was sweeping across the US on a hugely successful stadium tour that significantly outgrossed the performances by his friend and rival David Bowie, with whom Elton was engaged in semi-friendly sniping. Elton decided to signal his support for the Stooges, plus his own general zaniness, by renting a gorilla suit and planning a one-ape stage invasion during the Stooges stint.

Creem
had prepared a photographer for the stunt. Unfortunately, no one had prepared Iggy. Indeed, the previous night he had disappeared with the usual local ‘Rich Bitch’, to use the Stooges’ term of endearment. Early in the morning she brought him back to the band’s hotel unconscious; he had gobbled down her entire supply of Quaaludes. Scott Asheton and a friend of the band, Doug Currie, were called to lift his dead weight out of her Corvette; carrying him into the hotel, they dropped him and were overcome with a giggling fit, seeing him peacefully sleeping, sprawled over a spiky Mediterranean bush.